Prince, Bowie and Haggard: Icons? Legends? What's the difference?

April 27 (Reuters) - The year 2016 has so far witnessed the
death of three musical greats: Prince, David Bowie and Merle
Haggard. When Haggard died, National Public Radio felt
comfortable announcing"Country Music Legend and Icon, Dies at
79." Those two terms are often considered interchangeable, but
are they? Is there a difference?

Many entertainers have been labeled icons - Britney Spears
is a prime example. But the three musicians who just passed seem
to be in a different realm. Not just their artistic genius
unites them. It's the fact that our culture -- and our world --
are different because they existed.

An icon can show us who we are. But a legend shows us who we
could be.

Prince, a child prodigy who taught himself to play a wide
range of instruments, explored daring erotic themes in his
music. He played with new ways to be a man of color in America,
putting on theatrical stage performances in which the
musician/sex symbol showed off his feminine side in purple silk
and diamonds.

Creating a style never before heard, Prince blended pop,
funk, blues, jazz and rock 'n' roll. He set his own rules in the
music industry and branched out from music into film. His songs
could be explicitly raunchy ("Darling Nikki") but could also
bring passion to a spiritual plane ("Adore"). Prince, a
committed Jehovah's Witness, broke with pop tradition to include
frequent religious motifs in his songs, such as the messianic "I
Would Die 4 U."

Philosopher and Princeton professor Cornel
West noted Prince's strong social consciousness, which channeled
rebellion against oppression and care for society's most
vulnerable into his art. In 2015, he wrote "Baltimore," a song
lamenting the death of Freddie Gray, the unarmed
African-American whose fatal encounter with Baltimore police
sparked riots in the city and widespread outrage nationally.
Prince's lyrics became a mantra for protesters: "If there ain't
no just then there ain't no peace."

Prince will be remembered as an artist who not only remade
the sonic landscape but also left us with expanded notions of
what it means to be male and female, black and white, erotic and
spiritual.

Bowie, too, changed musical and cultural paradigms. In his
first TV appearance in 1964 as the founder of the hilariously
named Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-Haired Men,
the 17-year-old announced himself as an impish subvert, someone
who was not going to take society as he found it.

That attitude was evident in Bowie's 1983 challenge to MTV,
to include more black musicians. Upon the news of his death, rap
artist MC Hammer tweeted, "Salute and Thank you
to #DavidBowie for standing up for #BlackMusicians." Bowie's
views on society's wrongs emerged in songs like "Under the God,"
which depicts the rise of neo-Nazis and the horror of racism.

From his incarnations as the glam Ziggy Stardust and the
avant-garde Thin White Duke, to his nimble turns at rock 'n'
roll, disco, new wave, folk rock, industrial rock and
electronica - as well as his memorable turns in films like The
Man Who Fell to Earth - Bowie became known as an innovator and a
surprising shape-shifter. According to music journalist Joe
Lynch, Bowie influenced more musical genres than any other rock
star. "Without David Bowie," the singer Moby said, "popular
music as we know it pretty much wouldn't exist."

Prince and Bowie not only transcended the particularities of
the decades most closely associated with them (Bowie, the 1970s
and 1980s; Prince, the 1980s and 1990s), but they also
transformed their art form. They created fresh outlets for
expression in music, as well as in the spheres of fashion and
gender identity.

Prefabricated categories could not hold them. They broke
down barriers and blazed trails. Their surges of creativity
could barely be contained in their astonishing output. Both
Prince's and Bowie's bodies of work contain patterns of
unexpected twists and turns.

The word "icon" comes from Latin, meaning a picture or
statue, and from the Greek "eikon," referring to a likeness or
portrait but also to an image in a mirror. Spears' status as pop
iconis easy to justify. If you were watching MTV in the 1990s,
her pigtailed debut as a sexy Catholic schoolgirl in "Baby One
More Time" is indelibly etched into your brain. She launched a
new phase of teen pop, grew to be world famous, and her songs
became ubiquitous earworms. But is she a legend? Maybe not.

While an icon mirrors and captures certain impulses and
trends in society, a legend offers something more. Spears may be
more a product of a specific time than an artist who transcends
the moment and whose legacy is more lasting. The word "legend"
has its roots in notions of storytelling and map-making, of
understanding and finding our way. Legends do not just reflect
the culture; they reveal it and point society in new directions.

Merle Haggard is credited for helping to create the
raw-edged Bakersfield sound of country music in the 1950s -
which, in turn, influenced rock-and-rollers like the Beatles and
the Rolling Stones. He brought the roughness of his hardscrabble
background (including prison stints) to the genre and expressed
solidarity with the plight of the working man in songs like "Big
City," which rails against economic inequality in a way that
resonates today: "There's folks who never work and they've got
plenty / Think I'll walk off my steady job today."

Haggard is notable because he became iconic for reasons that
almost run counter to his legendary status. In 1969, his
hippie-blasting hit "Okie from Muskogee" became the anthem for
Americans angry with the left for protesting the Vietnam War.
The song brought him wealth, fame and the appreciation of
President Richard M. Nixon. If he'd stayed in this mode, his
status as a cultural icon for conservative whites would have
been more than secure. But he didn't.

Because he is also the musician who wrote "Irma Jackson," a
song about a white man's thwarted love for a black woman in a
world that doesn't understand that "love is colorblind." He
released that song in 1972 - years after he wrote it - because
his record company feared it would hurt his image. Hag did not
care.

He was also open to change and admitted when he had been
wrong. He explained his evolving political views and thoughts on
"Okie" to writer RJ Smith in 2000:

"At the time I wrote that song, I was just about as
intelligent as the American public was. And they was about as
dumb as a rock. About Vietnam, about marijuana and other things.
When you get older, you find that things you were absolutely,
positively sure about, you didn't know nothin' about."

Haggard expressed an openness to change that was about
healing wounds as much as challenging wrongs.

Through their art, Prince, Bowie and Haggard not only showed
us new possibilities for our individual identities, but they
also revealed to us how to better connect to one another as a
society.